You can’t help but look over your shoulder in some of our collection “pods” as you walk through our collections and research facility in Gatineau, Quebec, especially if you are there early in the day and seemingly on your own. Sometimes it feels like you’re being watched, not by sets of eyes, but by some creatures that are, you might say, just a shadow of their former selves.

Zoos and aquariums provide expert capacity at keeping animals alive and in their natural state. Museums keep records of these animals from the parts that can be kept around for a long time, effectively stopping the natural biological processes of decomposition.

The idea of mounting skeletons of animals probably goes back to the first cave dwellers, when someone wanted to clear out the leftovers and found the remains of a particularly good hunt. What better way to preserve the memory of that day than to recreate it, especially if you didn’t have much skill at painting on cave walls. But of course, mounting a skeleton takes a lot more time and effort than picking up a scrap of charcoal—and a lot of preparation time, too, if it is going to last.

Museums have been mounting skeletons for years because it is a lot more realistic to make the bones last a long time than to keep a whole specimen (especially a large one). For really ancient animals such as dinosaurs, it is mostly the fossilized bone that has been preserved for us to study, along with some imprints of their flesh and their footprints.

Why preserve bones? What do skeletons tell us about an animal? In point of fact, a whole lot!

Skeletal sets are a critical reference for conducting comparative anatomy between different vertebrate species. “It’s in the bones,” you might say.

And the differences in these bones can be just as important if you are trying to tell the difference between two closely related species. Kamal Khidas, our Chief Collections Manager of Vertebrate Zoology, has been able to document that by taking a lot of measurements from many skulls of the bobcat (Lynx rufus) and the Canada lynx (Lynx canadensis).For many people, seeing the two together it would be like meeting twins for the first time, but when you know the characteristics of each one, it becomes easier.